Final Word: Tanning addiction? Yikes

This study that said someone with skin cancer will keep using a tanning bed is seriously disturbing.

Look, I grew up in northeast Ohio. The sun doesn’t shine there much, and so every year when prom time rolled around, all the high school girls would save up their extra allowance or paycheck money and buy whatever “tanning” package we could afford.

And of course, we’d get burned. At least the really white ones, like me. My girlfriends with that great olive-toned Italian skin would be fine.
We’d lie to our moms about it, just like everything else we weren’t allowed to do because it was bad for us.

Why? Because we couldn’t stand the idea of looking so WHITE in the pictures.
(Never mind that we completely lost sight of what a normal color was for skin, so as a result, the prom pictures I have from the early 1980s look frighteningly like the pictures of the tanning mom Patricia Krentcil!!) But we were young. And STUPID.

There’s nothing like being 17 to cause you to not care AT ALL about what you will look like tomorrow or whether or not you will get skin cancer.

But if you are still tanning indoors at age 30, I need to sit down with you.
And if you have been diagnosed with skin cancer and you are still tanning, I’m not sure I know what to say.

This study confirms what I already thought was true.
Some people are just addicted to tanning.
Forget skin cancer, do you know how old you look?
It’s not good.
The tan lasts a week. The skin damage lasts a lifetime.
That vanity that is causing you to tan when you are young is going to haunt you when you’re old.
Or when you ‘re still young, but LOOK like you’re 80.
Give it a rest.
You’ll thank me later.